Andre Balogh on the end of the shuttle era

29 July 2011

On Thursday 21 July 2011, a NASA shuttle returned from space for the 135th and very last time. Since the first shuttle launch in 1981, Atlantis and her sisters, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery and Endeavour have been symbolic of human scientific ambition and achievement: at once powerful, awe-inspiring and costly.

What does the end to the shuttle programme mean for space exploration and the next generation of enquiring scientific minds?

What is your earliest memory of space exploration?

The modern world could not be what it is without the pioneering space missions from the 1960s and 1970s

It was in October 1957, I remember seeing a newspaper headline about the launch of the first Sputnik by the Soviet Union.

After Sputnik, the following month brought the launch of Sputnik 2 carrying Laika, the first space dog, as well as instrumentation that may have been the first to see the Earth’s radiation belts, even if it was not recognised at the time. Who knew I would meet the man who designed and built that instrument, Professor Yuri Logachev, whilst attending Sputnik’s 50th anniversary celebrations at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow.

Subsequent years were punctuated by news of successes in space, with 1961 standing out as a big milestone. I was still engaged in secondary and university education, but I really remember when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and that year the USA also launched Telstar which was the first telecommunication satellite to transmit live TV between continents. The images were fleeting and quite poor, but real! It was also the year in which President Jack Kennedy committed the United States to land astronauts on the Moon and bring them safely within the decade.

What effect has space and space exploration had on your career over the years?

In 1964, I came to Imperial as a Research Fellow of the then European Space Research Organisation (ESRO). I joined the Cosmic Ray Group because I wanted to study the effect of space radiation on semiconductors, a topic pioneered by the American engineers working on Telstar. It was an exciting time for the Group; we had just launched the first instrument for studying high energy cosmic rays aboard Ariel 1, the first British satellite. Between 1964 and 1968, no fewer than six space-going scientific instruments were built in the Group’s laboratories for the first Eurpoean scientific space missions.

From teh late 1970s, I led Imperial’s work on the joint European-American Ulysses probe, which was launched in October 1990 from the Discovery shuttle. Over its nearly nineteen years of operation, our instrument on Ulysses successfully mapped out the magnetic field in the three-dimensional heliosphere (the vast bubble in space that surrounds the Sun) at all phases of the 11-year solar sunspot cycle. The instrument also detected the tail of the comet Hayakawa at 600 million km from the Sun, a very happy result that deservedly made the headlines and the Guinness Book of World records.

There have also been dramatic moments: the loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 that I witnessed from Cape Canaveral,which led to a four-year delay in the launch of Ulysses. Ten years later, in 1996, the explosion of the first Ariane 5 rocket in 1996 that I saw from the launch site in French Guiana destroyed the first four Cluster satellites, whose mission was to study in the detail the Earth’s magnetosphere and its response to solar outbursts. We eventually launched the four rebuilt Cluster-II spacefraft aboard the two Russian Soyuz-Fregat rockets in 2000. Ulysses and Cluster were important ‘firsts’, and the data that they have gathered remain benchmarks for testing models and theories of the space environment and its effects.

Longevity is very important in space science. Most missions seem to take a decade or two between conception and launch, and it is only then that the scientific harvest can begin. But I was also involved in our research group’s proposals for the European Space Agency’s Rosetta comet rendezvous probe as well as in the two-spacecraft Bepi-Colombo orbiter mission to the planet Mercury. However, Rosetta, launched in 2004 will only arrive to its target comet in 2014, and BepiColombo is still under construction for a launch in 2014 and an arrival to Mercury scheduled in 2020. It is good to know that even though my activities have been scaled down, the Imperial group in which I have spent my career remains at the forefront of scientific space research.

What has been the most important thing to have come out of the space programmes?

As scientists, we have learnt much about the Earth’s space environment, the Sun and the solar system and the Universe as a whole. Our horizons have expanded immeasurably and we now understand far better our place in the Universe.

The modern world could not be what it is without the pioneering space missions from the 1960s and 1970s. We take it all for granted, but where would we be without all the telecommunication and direct broadcast satellites in geostationary orbit around the Earth; without the Earth environment monitoring satellites that observe so many aspects of the solid Earth, the oceans and ice sheets, and of course the weather and the climate; without the Global Positioning System (GPS) that we use to pinpoint ourselves almost magically. The greatest practical achievement of the space programme has been to integrate the whole range of infrastructure in space into the world in which we live.

What role does space and space exploration have to play in society?

Seeing astronauts speeding almost light-heartedly in their buggy across the Moon was a truly inspirational sight

Man in space has always been a source of fascination for many. The great success of the Apollo programme, undertaken to demonstrate the superiority of the United States in space in the 1960s, resulted in what has been arguably the greatest technological achievement in the history of mankind. Seeing the astronauts speeding almost light-heartedly in their buggy across the Moon was a truly inspirational sight. The seemingly more humdrum activities with the Earth-orbiting space shuttles, the Russian Mir space station and the International Space Stations also remain an important aspect of what space represents to the public.

Beyond the utilisation of space to support our life in so many ways, space missions have opened windows on the world beyond. Brilliant astrophysical observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Herschel telescope have helped us see first our solar system, the Sun and the planets, and then out onto the universe. Not surprisingly, the awesomeness of the universe as shown by these telescope has influenced greatly our understanding of ourselves. The expanding numbers of planets discovered around more distant stars and the inevitable question of life beyond the Earth will continue to fascinate for a very long time.

What do you think is the future of manned space flight, or missions to other planets?

It’s only the space shuttle programme that is ending now. The International Space Station remains in orbit, to be supplied by the Russian Soyuz vehicles and the European unmanned supply ship. But NASA also has plans to follow up and intensify the use of the space station in the medium term. It remains a large, complex, highly capable platform for assessing manned capabilities in near-Earth space even if without much focus about what would be next. The recently abandoned plans for visiting the Moon again leave the question open about the future of manned space programmes. A manned Mars mission is really out of the question, in technical and financial terms, even it remains a rhetorical goal in the distant future.